Earth's Health, Our Health

Today I picked up reading The Omnivore's Dilemma, where Michael Pollan's good points and tidbits of information never cease to capture my attention. I blogged on this earlier when I talked about how corn is taking over the world, but today I'll tell you about People's Park. People's Park in California is what is left of the original 60's grassroots attempt to bring farming back to its natural state. The organic food they grow is sold to Whole Foods in Berkeley - but these aren't the farmers' pictures you see on the walls of Whole Foods touting how great their product is (sorry, Pollan's style rubs off on me). Anyway if it were up to me, we could make places like People's Park into a farmer's market and this would be the norm throughout the country - subsistence farming and locally grown foods - instead of the mass industrialized supermarket. But then, this is America, and I've always been one to love the way people lived thousands of years ago and think that's the way humans were meant to live, far superior to the industrialized society we've become. I wouldn't mind reading Sir Albert Howard's An Agricultural Testamant, though, and figuring out from the expert how to compost my food scraps. There is something instinctively right about the idea of the health of the soil being linked to the health of all the creatures that depend on it - an idea that was once discussed by Plato and Thomas Jefferson.